The annular solar eclipse is fast approaching. I’m getting my protocols ironed out in advance, as one does. My solar scope is set up and, as expected, the hydrogen alpha filter works great. The trouble is, it won’t be much use during the eclipse, when the sunspots and other goodies on the sun will be (what’s the word–occulted? overshadowed?, ah, yes!) eclipsed by the moon.
I tried out handholding my Nikon and my Sony with their respective telephotos, and I tried eyepiece projection (fancy name for holding my phone to the eyepiece and hoping) with my iPhone as well. Here are the results.
I was a bit surprised, to be honest. The longer reach of the Sony (600mm zoom telephoto vs the Nikon’s 500mm fixed telephoto) gave it a bit of an advantage. But what was much more of an advantage was the electronic viewfinder. I don’t know if you’ve seen them before, but the white light filters that go on the business end of a telephoto lens or a telescope completely black out the image. You can’t see anything unless the sun is in the viewfinder. Just getting the sun in the viewfinder can be surprisingly tricky, and it took me several tries with the Nikon’s DSLR viewfinder. But with the Sony, it was a piece of cake. I imagine there’s some explanation having to do with the greater dynamic range/response of the electronics as opposed to the traditional system; I don’t really care. All I know is I could find the sun in no time.
That said, I was surprised by the photo results. The Sony’s images looked much better straight out of the camera, while the Nikon’s was a featureless white disk. (The iPhone’s image doesn’t even bear description.) But in the processing software (I use Lightroom Classic), all I had to do was take the edge off the highlights using the highlight slider tool, and the Nikon’s image was nearly perfect. It had better overall white balance too (perhaps my settings for ISO or white balance in each camera made the difference).
Here are the images straight out of the box (but cropped to square):
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